


Teachable Skills

by crystalsoulslayer



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 09:04:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6899725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crystalsoulslayer/pseuds/crystalsoulslayer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor has been tortured using stolen Dalek technology, and Clara needs to calm him down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teachable Skills

**Author's Note:**

> Adopted prompt from antennapedia on Tumblr: “Twelve/Clara, hurt/comfort. Twelve post-torture, incoherent, refusing help but in desperate need of it.”

“Doctor, it’s okay, it’s just me,” she tells him, gently as she can. “Just us, you don’t need to—“

“They were very powerful once, you know. Couldn’t stop them if you’d wanted to, and why would you want to? Loveliest people you’d ever meet, honestly, the Trakenites. The old ones, I mean, proper ones, proper… proper… they were proper. Courtesy. They knew courtesy.”

Clara nods, pretending to listen as he rambles. He does this when he’s freaking out. Not that he doesn’t normally babble on about something or other, but it’s usually got some semblance of meaning to it. He’d been quiet for a while, when they got back into the TARDIS, but she asked him if he was okay, and it started up again. Words, words, words. One subject to the next, if there were any subject at all; sometimes, he’d pick a word and start listing similar ones, like he was reading a thesaurus. He never answered the question.

He won’t let her tend to him. He never does, especially not when it’s serious – the mildest scrape is a source of great concern, of course, and even greater drama. But if he’s dealing with something that is genuinely horrible, he refuses all attempts at treatment. He must be tricked into it.

When he pauses for a moment, apparently captivated by the shiny handle on the bathtub faucet, Clara says, keeping her tone scrupulously light and calm, “Hey, could you help with something else? Seeing as you’re here already.”

“Help you? What? With, I mean?”

“The bath. I’d love a bath.”

“Bath. You Romans love a bath – no, you’re not Roman. Are you? Someone is. Maybe it’s me. Oh, I’m from Gallifrey, so that’s not… Well. What do you want me to do? To help? I can help. Assist. Support.”

“Well, it’s just that I’m not sure it’s a good temperature. I was hoping you could check.”

He nods, moves over to the tub. His whole body is trembling, hasn’t stopped since she got him out of that cell. According to the TARDIS scanner, they didn’t do any physical damage. The gadget they used on him stimulated the nerves directly, so the Doctor is not in any medical danger.

Unfortunately, the technology was stolen from the Daleks. It brought back some memories for him. He’s been in a continuous state of panic since.

He puts a hand in the water, nods fervently. “It’s almost the exact temperature as that hot spring you liked on Alrazed. Maybe we should go back there, a few hundred years before that civil war started. They have the loveliest breakfast bar. Scones you’d kill for. Are they scones? I thought they were scones.”

“Are you _sure_ it’s a good temperature?”

“Reasonably. As much as I can be without being you.”

“Well, it’s just, you only put your hand in. Surely you can be a bit more thorough.” She grins at him, starts undoing the buttons of his shirt.

“Are you in one of your moods again?”

“What moods? I don’t have moods.”

“You do. You do weird nonsense like this and then you say you’re in a mood, and then you kiss me. Are you going to kiss me?”

“It’s not 'in _a_ mood,' it’s 'in _the_ mood,' Doctor. I just wanted a bath. Be great if you could really, really confirm it’s a good temperature.”

“What, put my shirt in the water?” he asks, bewildered, as she removes it. “How will my shirt help? It doesn’t change color based on temperature, or anything like that. Maybe it should, I could invent one.”

“I thought you might try more than just your hand.”

“What, should I stick my whole arm in?”

“Or your whole body.”

“Very funny. What are you up to, Clara Oswald? You’re up to something. What are you doing?” She’s started undoing his trousers, which he permits, but he’s squinting suspiciously at her.

“I told you, I want you to help me with the bath. Some serious data gathering needs to occur.” She pulls his trousers and shorts down to his knees. When she looks back up at him, the suspicious squint has been replaced by a glare. “What?”

“You’re trying to take care of me,” the Doctor says. Bugger. She ought to have come up with a better cover. She sighs, but doesn’t get the chance to answer him before he speaks again. “I don’t need you to take care of me, Clara, I’m not helpless, I can handle myself. I’ve _been_ handling myself for _two thousand years_.”

Clara raises an eyebrow at him.

He flushes pink. For whatever reason, when he’s naked in front of her, he has an easier time understanding euphemisms. “You know what I meant.”

“I’m well aware that you can take care of yourself, Doctor, but you don’t have to. I don’t want you to.”

“You _want_ me to lose something I need?”

“I – what? How is that even _remotely_ what I said?”

“If you take care of me, I will need you to do it again the next time, and the time after, and _every_ time, and when I lose you, I will have forgotten how to do it myself.”

The bathroom’s quiet for a long moment. “You don’t know that,” Clara says, eventually. “You’re just catastrophizing, imagining it will be worse than it really – “

He looks away from her abruptly, at the mirror, watches a drop of condensation run down the steamed-up mirror. She stops talking, and after a moment, he says, “I couldn’t imagine it any worse than it actually was.”

Amy and Rory and River. The Doctor has never told her all that much about what happened after they were gone. Clara knows he went to stay with Jenny and Vastra and Strax, that they “cared for him,” but she doesn’t know exactly what he means by that. They simply told her to ask the Doctor when she asked. Vastra’s exact words have always stuck in her mind: _He was in a truly dark place then, Miss Oswald. I doubt he’d want you to visit there, except at his own invitation._

Clara puts a hand on his chest, rubs gently. “Doctor,” she says, “please, listen to me, okay? Because I’ve got an idea.”

He nods, stiffly, still staring at the fog on the mirror.

“Sometimes I get really worried about you, especially when stuff like this happens. When you let me help you, it makes me feel better, so I don’t worry so much. So my idea is, you don’t think of it as me taking care of you, think of it the other way around. You’re making me feel better. And then, in the _extremely_ unlikely event that I’m not around one day, all you have to do is imagine it’s me. You do it for yourself, and you imagine it’s me, and you won’t have forgotten.”

He frowns, says, “Imagine it’s you?”

“Yeah. You can think, ‘what would Clara do for me, if she was here,’ and then you’ll know what to do for yourself. And if you do that, if you practice for a while, eventually, you won’t need to think about it anymore. You won’t forget, even if you don’t have someone to tell you.”

“I can’t do that. I can never… I don’t know what you’d do.”

“You’ll learn. We just have to practice.” She smiles, reaches up to run her fingers through his hair. He closes his eyes. “Shall we practice?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s take a bath. Get the muck off.”

And they do. Clara talks to him, reminds him where they are, _in the TARDIS, we’re safe, no one is going to hurt us here._ The Doctor holds her while she washes his hair, his back. He’s reluctant to let go, so she holds him instead, pulls him close, hands gliding through suds on his chest, kisses on his shoulders.

He’s still trembling, so she asks, “Are you scared?” He shakes his head. “Doctor, tell me the truth. Are you scared?” Hesitantly, he nods. “What are you scared of?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you scared of me?”

“No. Never.”

“Do you think someone’s going to hurt you again?”

Uncertainly, he says, “No. We’re in the TARDIS, we’re safe.”

“That’s right. What are you thinking about?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Are you thinking about something that _will_ happen, or something that already did?”

“Both,” he says, and his voice sounds wrong, it’s high and shaky and doesn’t sound like him at all, “both, Clara, it was _days_ in the War and this time it wasn’t them but it – I know it wasn’t, it wasn’t them, but I could hear them, the… their voices, and the engines on the ship, the charge building in the weapons banks a level below me, and the other… the others, they had others, I could hear them screaming. And even if it wasn’t the Daleks, it felt like it was them, it felt like they found me again. Feels like they’re _going_ to find me again, now.”

Clara runs her hands over his thighs, soothing. “It was horrible on its own, what those people did to you, and it reminded you of something even worse. You can’t remember that without remembering how it made you feel. You’re scared because you remember your fear from before, not because anything’s happening now.”

He’s curled up a bit, knees halfway to his chest, listening, fingers curled around her left forearm. Still shaking a little, but he seems better. Calmer.

“Are we safe, Doctor?”

“Yeah, we’re in the TARDIS, we’re safe,” he replies, and he sounds like he believes it this time.

“Got any opinions on the bath’s temperature?”

“It’s nice.” She can hear the smile in his voice, and he rests his head on her shoulder. “D’you like it?”

“It’s perfect. And I have excellent company.”

He gives a precarious little chuckle. “Flatterer.”

“I thought I was an egomaniac.”

“No reason you can’t be both.”

“I suppose you’d know.”

“Fair point.”

 

At Clara’s urging, they get out of the bath a bit later, when the Doctor has stopped shaking. He reaches automatically for his regular clothes, but she suggests he get in his jim-jams instead.

“I don’t want to,” he says, quietly.

“Why not?”

“Skaro.” Ah, yes. More memories. Clothes sometimes have very powerful associations for him, for reasons she has yet to determine.

“Okay. We can work on that another time, then. The idea is just to wear something comfortable.”

He winds up in an exceptionally worn pair of regular trousers and that holey jumper. Kitchen, tea, sandwiches, Clara telling stories about the kids at her school –

“—and this kid, maybe fourteen years old, do you know what he does? He says, ‘You’re not my teacher.’ _To my face_. And I say, oh yeah, what am I, then? And he looks me right in the eye, and he bloody _sings back to me_ , ‘All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.’ I don’t think I’ll ever _really_ believe it actually happened.”

“He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Not that lucky, he still has to see _me_ every day—“

—and it’s off to bed. Clara’s bedroom in the TARDIS has tiny, dim lights built into the baseboards; she’s quite sure they weren’t there before the two of them started sleeping there together. Clara has never seen him sleeping, though, so maybe he just lays next to her for a while. Odd thought, but if that’s what he does, it makes him happy the next morning. She should ask, one of these days.

Not now, though. Now, the Doctor is crawling in beside her, easing closer and closer to her, like he’s been magnetized. She’s doing it too, she realizes, and smiles.

Kisses, as many as he likes. He wraps himself around her, not so much spooning as trying to envelop her entirely, and asks, softly, “Do you feel better now?”

“Much. Did you learn anything?”

“Lots. You’re an amazing teacher.”

“Quite right.”


End file.
